"It would be easy for me to dismiss my ignorance as a result of my youth. I was only 16 going on 17 when the relationship in question occurred, and up until that point, the men in my life —namely my father and significant others — insisted on infantilizing me."

TIL that 3-6% of birds across five species have morphological sex characteristics that differ from their chromosomes. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

my modest collection of flies with WIDE heads 🙇 a hammer-headed Richardia (Ecuador), a stalk-eyed Chaetodiopsis (Mozambique), a pointy-eyed Ophthalmoptera (Colombia), and an antlered Richardia (Colombia) why though? male-male competition? sexual selection? chime-in if you know!

New preprint out with @elspethready.bsky.social : "The emergence of sharing networks through indirect signaling". osf.io/preprints/so...

Woke up this morning to 6 new review requests. It’s a Christmas miracle.

We are very close to releasing a new code repo in Julia for all the models in Modeling Social Behavior! Stay tuned.

In episode 1008, I talk with Dr. Paul Smaldino about his great book, Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution. #Science youtu.be/7Ue6pqGpHss

You can check out the pre-print here: Moser, C., & Smaldino, P.E. (2025). Limit Cycles in Opinion Dynamic Networks with Competing Stubborn Agents. osf.io/preprints/so...

Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review. Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...

Excited to get this paper published! 🌟 We argue that men exaggerate patriarchal beliefs in an effort to signal conformity to others, which in turn fuels misperceptions about peers - making patriarchal norms resistant to change. royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review. Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...

How likely are you to invest in a new business? Ask your partner to marry you? Move to a new country? A new model by SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino and colleagues explains how wealth, experience, and environment shape our risk tolerance — and how those effects persist across generations.

This is high quality data journalism and also means you can scoff at your friend's sheeple Google suggestions and use this dashboard instead

Our School of Information Sciences is running four searches, and we can hire more than four candidates. Here’s the first link, for a job that might appeal to people working in history of information, history of science, or digital humanities. +

New pre-print with @psmaldino.bsky.social on an agent-based model of propaganda in online spaces. Using the voter model from physics, we simulate networks with stubborn agents (zealots) who do not change their opinions, asking about their optimal positioning for influencing the network.

Postdoc position in individual-level incentives, social learning, and payoff-biased imitation shape group-level accuracy in complex prediction and decision-making tasks in Konstanz files.newsletter2go.com/l3slzozn/s_i...

We are on the brink of a once in a generation transformation in world politics. @erikvoeten.bsky.social @segoddard.bsky.social and I talk neo-royalism as one future. Give a list: goodauthority.org/news/the-new... Check out the article it is based on here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

1/This week has seen a blitz of what looks like corruption sandals: Saudi development deals for US military tech, Pakistani payments to Trump insiders for tariff relief, Swiss gold bars for a trade deal. Far from a payoff, this is a reordering of internat'l system. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mxthh...

I cosign every single word of this anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

Using AI to amplify societal biases, exhibit 2490439840398

Monday boost for yesterday's newsletter, looking at whether we can discern general principles for how to connect teams to make them smarter: https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/when-less-communication-is-more-collective #psychology #cogsci #collectiveintelligence

Come and do a PhD at Exeter with me and Chico Camargo (Computer Science) on human-genAI coevolution "Leveraging Natural Language Processing for Data-Driven Agent-Based Modelling of Online Cultural Dynamics" www.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/recr... More details here: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

THEN YOU PURCHASE THEM AND DO NOT USE THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS

Congratulations to Dr @mariapykala.bsky.social for successfully defending her PhD thesis yesterday. Two big themes. 1) Social learning as a two-step process with psychological biases shaping both network formation and social learning given a network. 2) Cumulative cultural evolution in an AI world.

Congratulations to Andoni Sergiou for defending his PhD thesis today! And special thanks to @psmaldino.bsky.social and @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social for examining his thesis

This is…outstanding. If I may, I urge us to read it carefully, and appreciate the details, the shape, the picture it paints.

Thinking this level of inequality is unsustainable isn’t radical, thinking it isn’t is

why has no-one written a book on the evolution of cooperation titled "Decent with Modification"? #evolution #culturalevolution

Four (!) three-year postdoc positions available at @au.dk: international.au.dk/about/profil... Join an incredible team & help understand the psychological & political implications of the clash between high-speed society & slow-speed democracy. Please share! @tboeggild.bsky.social can help with Qs

This week we talk to @babeheim.bsky.social about culture, change, modeling, running red lights, and the game of go. youtu.be/nqTkSK-qtJM www.podbean.com/eas/pb-hrn9v...

In 1970, Hunter S Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen, CO, under the progressive “Freak Power” party platform. He lost by 31 votes despite receiving more votes than the previous winner, largely because the Dems and Republicans colluded to run a single candidate. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bat...

They just gutted Teen Vogue which had top notch political journalism. The media is continuing to purge any sort of political dissent to Trump and the oligarchs. www.vogue.com/article/teen...

I was laid off from Teen Vogue today along with multiple other staffers, and today is my last day. certainly more to come from me when the dust has settled more, but to my knowledge, after today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue.

This thicc 71-chapter book (academic.oup.com/edited-volum...) arrived just in time to use as the textbook for my new "Cultural Evolution" class I've just started teaching! Featuring this chapter from @cailinmeister.bsky.social @psmaldino.bsky.social & Jingyi Wu as well as much more including...

Congrats to all involved in the production of the massive Oxford Handbook of cultural evolution. You can read our paper The Cultural Evolution Of Science here: cailinoconnor.com/wp-content/u...

Screensnapshot of our times. Corporate pressure to use AI creates bad outcomes with real-life consequences; seeking to unpack the problem yields more pressure to indulge in the very thing causing the problem.

I know it’s too much to expect them to know their history, but if the American Revolution had a motto, it definitely would not have been “immigrants go home.” It would have been “get your fucking soldiers out of our cities.”

Re-posting this because I really like it and I think we need to understand identity from a functionalist perspective more than ever. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Revision posted! An evolutionary model of identity signaling with nested/overlapping/intersectional identities, complex multidimensional signaling capabilities, and a primer on ancient Mesopotamia. What more could you ask for? osf.io/preprints/so...

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... Apply by Nov 12! Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

We don’t need that fascist groove thing. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49B...

My house cat has stripes in his spots. I modeled it by putting a Turing cell differentiation model *inside* another Turing cell differentiation model. Here's the model if you're interested: enfascination.com/htdocs/Cats_... click Setup, wait 5 seconds, then Go

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

A main organizer of VC Defensa in Ventura County was rammed in his vehicle by federal agents and taken into custody this morning. This video is from VC Defensa IG and shows the ramming. Organizers are thinking he’ll be taken to LA MDC—headed there now

What is sexual selection all about... definitionally and mathematically? A super talented PI, Jussi Lehtonen, is looking for a postdoc to work it all out! Deadline end of this month. ats.talentadore.com/apply/postdo...

I am happy to share the conversation I had with @mgurven.bsky.social about the evolutionary aspects of humans living seven decades. Hope everyone enjoys! @princetonupress.bsky.social convergingdialogues.substack.com/p/449-living...

Thanks Paul for catching that error in our original post! Congratulations to @psmaldino.bsky.social on his ACE Course Design Awards for "Cultural Evolution" and for "Modeling Social Behaviour".

Honored to have won TWO Advancing Cultural Evolution Course Design Awards for my courses “Cultural Evolution” and “Modeling Social Behavior”.

What Thiel is saying about tax havens = what Altman is saying about copyright: "I can't be rich unless you let me steal from you." This is how Broligarchs differ from oligarchs of yore: the latter tried to hide their thievery; the Broligarchs trumpet their entitlement to steal as a natural right.